News

Our streets are full of fear

In the week when the word “yob” was banned by Scotland Yard because it might “alienate” teenagers and injure their tender feelings (oh boo hoo), Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, 40, was murdered by a gang of “youths” outside his flat in Hackney, east London.

Stevens, a married father of two little girls, was an émigré from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Britain, where he held down two jobs — delivering food for Tesco during the day, night portering at a restaurant in the evenings — to pay for his education. He was in the third year of a maths and finance degree at the University of Greenwich, having turned down a place at Cambridge so as to stay closer to home. A 17-year-old “youth” has been charged with his murder.

Stevens lost his life because he had had the temerity to ask the gang to keep the noise down after they broke into